Rings around the World

 

Peter Bassett

 

· It is sometimes claimed - usually as marketing hyperbole - that Ring performances are rare and special events. Special they may be but rare they are not. In the twelve months from March 2005 to March 2006, sixteen full productions were staged around the world, including in Brazil, China, Poland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, France and Belgium.

 

This is the set for Götterdämmerung under construction in the Teatro Amazonas Brazil

 

· In the twelve months from October 2006, another sixteen cities and festivals are presenting the Ring. Nine of them are in Germany but others are in Hungary, Canada, the United States, Austria and the United Kingdom.

 

· For the foreseeable future we can expect to see a dozen or so complete Rings each year. They are already being planned as far ahead as 2013 (the bicentenary of Wagner's birth) in Amsterdam, Seattle, Helsinki and Bayreuth. For 2010, planning is in train for Berlin, Hamburg, Erl, Milan, Bangkok and Los Angeles, and there are more to come. The much-anticipated Los Angeles Ring will have a budget of 32 million US dollars, which probably means $40 million by 2010. The current New York production will be retired in 2009 and a new one will take its place two years later. This will be set in Iceland - home of the sagas from which the Ring narrative derives - and its themes will include the causes and consequences of global warming and the melting of the ice caps. And why not? The Ring is, above all, a drama of ideas - and mythological tales are wonderfully adaptable.

 

· Of course, there'll be numerous stagings of the constituent parts of the Ring, not to mention Wagner's other works - I've counted 164 productions of the latter in the next twelve months, from Aachen to Zurich, from Barcelona to Tokyo.

 

· So why don't we see more Wagner in Australia? It's hardly a matter of popularity either here or elsewhere. All three cycles of this year's Covent Garden Ring sold out within a couple of hours of going on sale - at up to 850 pounds a seat.

 

 

 

Here is a scene from the new Covent Garden Walküre, with Bryn Terfel as Wotan and Rosalind Plowright as Fricka.

· The touring Mariinsky Ring in Cardiff last year sold out within four hours of the box office opening. Ring sell-outs are common, whether in Seattle, Copenhagen, Toronto, Aix-en-Provence or any of the other places offering performances. And Ring audiences are truly international. Seventy per cent of the audience for the 2004 Adelaide Ring came from outside South Australia, and a sizeable proportion had travelled from overseas especially for the event.

 

· Admittedly, singers and conductors need to be engaged years in advance, but, for administrators, the real obstacle seems to be the sheer scale of the Ring and the effort required to mount a new production. It's easier to concentrate on shorter and less demanding works. After all, the first Act of Götterdämmerung is as long as or longer than the whole of La bohème or Tosca or Don Pasquale or Lucia di Lammermoor, and only marginally shorter than ninety per cent of works in the standard repertory. With the Ring we're not talking about four operas of regular size but - comparatively speaking - seven or eight! One can understand why managements are frightened to tackle it.

 

· The Ring is expensive to perform if you only do one season but it becomes profitable to do three or four. Seattle has got this right, with its current production being performed four times over twelve years. At Bayreuth, each new Ring is usually staged five times, although there have been exceptions (the 1976 Ring was performed for six consecutive years, and the 1983 Ring for four years). The current New York Ring has been in the repertoire of the Metropolitan Opera for twenty years, and even the Chemnitz Ring is clocking up its seventh or eighth incarnation. Wagner's original sets of 1876 were still doing the rounds (in different theatres) until 1927 when they ended up in Prague.

 

· It's worth noting that towards the end of the 19th century, Wagner's operas accounted for nearly 60% of the total income of the Metropolitan Opera, with all other composers combined making up little more than 40%. And this continued well into the 1920's. Personally, I'm convinced that, with good management, Wagner can be a money-spinner for companies today. It just requires a willingness to make the effort.

 

· And while I'm on the subject of popular reception, we might note that Wagner oversaw just one season of the Ring - that in 1876. He had planned another the following year but the accumulated debts from building his Festival Theatre as well as producing the Ring made this impossible. The second performance at Bayreuth didn't take place until 1896, thirteen years after Wagner's death. However, he had developed a close relationship with the Jewish producer and singer Angelo Neumann who was permitted to copy the Bayreuth production in Leipzig in 1878 and Berlin in 1881, and then to buy the entire Bayreuth staging and take it with his travelling theatre all over Europe. Such was the interest in the work that this touring Ring company performed in 135 opera houses from London to St Petersburg. In 1882 alone, Neumann gave thirty-six cycles in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary and Austria. By the end of 1883, the year of Wagner's death, his troupe had presented 140 performances of the Ring and an additional fifty-eight concerts of Wagner's music.

 

Producer and singer Angelo Neumann

 

· Wagner called Neumann 'my friend and benefactor' and even contemplated handing over management of the Bayreuth Festival to him. The last contract they signed together provided for Neumann's exclusive rights to all of Wagner's works except Parsifal - which Wagner would have given him but for Cosima's insistence that it be done only at Bayreuth. As events turned out, this was just as well, since Wagner died without leaving a will (his debts had invariably exceeded his income) and the box office receipts from Parsifal kept the family afloat for many years.

 

· Other touring impresarios, such as the Irishman Thomas Quinlan followed in Neumann's footsteps. In our own time, Valery Gergiev of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg has taken or is taking his Ring production to Baden-Baden, Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, Cardiff, Orange County California, New York and perhaps Beijing. These tours are crucial to Gergiev's fund-raising activities for the Mariinsky.

 

 

 

 

Above are three examples of this extraordinary and much-travelled St Petersburg production. It draws its imagery from Russian folk tales

 

· Other Managements please note:- The Ring is being used to raise money!